In the early morning hours of March 10, thousands of users on X (formerly Twitter) began having trouble logging into the platform.
It was only the first service blip of at least three to come that same day and, if one cybercriminal group is to be believed, it was all on purpose.
“Twitter has been taken offline by Dark Storm Team” read one message on the messaging and social media platform Telegram.
Dark Storm Team, which shared the message publicly, was reportedly created in 2023 and has a history of launching attacks that can disrupt websites by sending massive traffic their way. These attacks, called “Distributed Denial of Service” or DDoS, attacks, are one of the most common form of cyberattacks online, and have been used to disrupt major companies’ online services.
In responding to the outages, X owner Elon Musk wrote:
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏. We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
For much of Monday, users could not load the X mobile app, the X website, or log into the services from their phones or laptops. The outages were recorded on the website Downdetector, which tracks user reports whenever popular websites have trouble loading or operating normally. According to Downdetector’s most recent data, X suffered problems between 2:30 and 3:00 am, Pacific Time, and again between 6:30 and 7:30 am, and then once more, for a more sustained but irregular period, between 8:00 and 11:00 am.
In response to the outages, X has rolled out the services of the company Cloudflare, which specifically provides protection from DDoS attacks. When X users try to reach certain parts of the website, or they arrive to the site from a potentially suspicious IP address, they are now prompted to fill out a form to prove they are a human user.
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